* baring it all with Dorianne Laux

So: remember all that paper that was under my desk two weeks ago that I cleared out just last week?

Well, now there’ s this:

* here there be manuscripts *

I handed this over to Ani earlier this week.

I’ve been busy working on a few different projects since school let out, hermitted away at my desk, coming away excited each night, talking her ear off about this concept or that change. It’s a terrifying stack: the soul in a ream of paper.

This week’s poem by Dorianne Laux deals with all manner of nakedness. What stands out is how the nakedness pointed out by the poet is the nakedness that is apparent in a straightforward sense, something of the inner being exposed through the particulars of its outer being.

Sharing the stack of papers visually – and literally, with a reader – carries with it similar feelings of nakedness.

The Nakedness of Things – Dorianne Laux *

There is nothing more naked than a cactus, its green skin exposed, the enlarged pores from which each spiny hair sprouts. Nothing so naked as a wave lifting its frothy dress to show off one glassy blue thigh. The pliers spreads its legs, sheathed in red rubber stockings, displays its shiny metal crotch, cold to the touch. A dab of kerosene behind an ear of glowing coal and it splays open, twisting in a pit, like the frayed wilderness of sex. Nothing naked as the rain, dragging its fingers over the mountain’s bare breasts or music undressing itself in the air. Look, it’s everywhere, the world undone, naked as the day it was born.

Published by Jose Angel Araguz

José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of six chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press) and Small Fires (FutureCycle Press). His poems, prose, and reviews have appeared in RHINO Poetry, New South, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. He runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College.
View all posts by Jose Angel Araguz